While homeownership provides consumption benefits, housing is risky. Using zip code housing returns, we document that homeowners are compensated for bearing housing risk. Our sample covers more than 9,000 zip codes across 135 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), representing almost 70% of the...

This paper shows that the impact of labor income risk on the cross-section of expected stock returns depends crucially on the horizon. Using a flexible empirical approach that allows us to include multiple horizons simultaneously, we find robust evidence that the two- to four-year horizon...

Sectoral labor reallocation shocks change the optimal allocation of workers across industries. We find that a proxy for this type of labor market shocks has very strong and robust predictive power for future stock market returns. In predictive regressions, the one-year out-of-sample R2 is as...

Emerging equity markets have become increasingly interrelated over the past two decades. For a sample of 32 emerging markets from four different regions we find significant positive time trends in cross-country correlations within regions, correlations across regions and in comovements with the...

Currency risk hedging typically aims at minimizing portfolio volatility. We find that while hedging lowers the volatility of international equity and bond portfolios, it also lowers portfolio returns. Furthermore, Sharpe ratios often deteriorate, portfolio skewness worsens and its kurtosis...

Human capital is one of the largest assets in the economy and in theory it may play an important role for asset pricing. Human capital is heterogeneous across investors and one source of heterogeneity is industry affiliation. I show that the cross-section of expected stock returns is primarily...

This paper investigates whether Euro-zone equity returns are driven by country or industry effects over the 1990 to 2008 period. Using a style analysis approach, we find that before the introduction of the Euro country effects dominate, while industry effects prevail after 1999. This reversal at...

We examine the relative importance of country, industry, world market and currency risk factors for international stock returns. Our approach focuses on testing the mean-variance efficiency of the various factor portfolios. An unconditional analysis does not detect significant differences...